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I, Interface: Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics Applied to User Interfaces
- wccrawford 15y agoOnly the first one seems to mean anything. (And the zeroth.) The third one he admits is a joke. The second one can't apply to something that can't make decisions autonomously. The only orders you can give it are very specific ones it's programmed for. And if you've programmed an interface to do something and it doesn't do it, that's so obviously a problem that we don't need to discuss it. 0 and 1 mean more, though. Interfaces should protect the user from their mistakes, so long as they don't prevent the user from accomplishing their tasks by doing so. This is trickier than it sounds since that much power is hard to bubble-wrap. Protecting the entire web from bad decisions is even tougher. Designing a protocol is hard. You practically have to be clairvoyant to foresee all the possible problems.
- hnal943 15y agoYou practically have to be clairvoyant to foresee all the possible problems. Which is also the point of the original laws.
- wccrawford 15y agoWhich is fine, when the device in question is programmed to evaluate them itself. Applications can't do that yet.
- sambeau 15y agoThis makes no sense to me. How about something like this instead: 1. An interface must ally itself with the user not the data. 2. How an interface works is more important than how an interface looks. 3. An interface must be as simple as possible but no simpler. 4. No interface is good interface, unless it breaks the other 3 rules.
- diwank 15y agoHave to admit that these are cool ways of looking at the fundamental objectives of a 'good' user interface. Honestly, looking at the laws and to interpret them literally does no justice to them.